Non-Fiction
Why I Joined the Peace Corps
I’ve written two posts relating to my Peace Corps experience, and that surprises me a bit because it was a long time ago and not something much on my mind. It is now, though, since I’ve been writing about it, and I thought I’d try to reconstruct the circumstances which led me to join up. It was 1980 and I’d been living in Iowa for about ten years when the idea occurred to me. Once an idea like that comes along and you get the urge for going, it’s hard to tamp it down.
I had applied to the Peace Corps once before, a dozen years earlier, when I was a college student in New York. After my sophomore year, I attended a summer program in Greece, and when I returned it was hard getting back into the old routine. Sitting in my classes, looking through the windows at the cold, gray city, I longed for the blue Mediterranean Sea and sky. Why did I ever return? But there was no going back to Greece. The program was over, the good friends I made there all dispersed, and besides, the Vietnam War was raging and I had a student deferment which I would lose if I left school. I started considering the Peace Corps.
In 1968 it was still a relatively new program and retained much of the glamour it had when JFK first proposed it. It was preferable to military service, which wouldn’t have appealed to me even without the unpopular war in Southeast Asia. The word army conjured to my mind a drab, regimented existence with little freedom and a commitment to obey orders no matter how inane they were. The idea of it turned me off, and the added prospect of being sent to Vietnam to shoot at people and be shot at didn’t make it any more attractive. On the other hand, visiting exotic lands as a Peace Corps volunteer and contributing something useful sounded ideal. The more I imagined such an experience, the more excited about it I became.
I went through the application process, which involved filling out many forms, undergoing psychological and physical testing, and taking a language acquisition aptitude test. After going through all that, I got a letter thanking me for my interest and informing me that they couldn’t use me until I graduated and had a degree. Why didn’t they tell me that in the first place? I decided that the government had greater need for me in GI fatigues than in any other capacity. I was pissed, and having pictured myself living in some sunny third world country, was more eager than ever to leave the dreary city. I had the urge for going and I did. Saving up a little money, I bought a one-way ticket on Icelandic Airlines and with about a hundred dollars in my pocket, started hitchhiking south as soon as I landed in Luxembourg. Three years later, I returned to New York, completed my coursework, and got my BA. By then I no longer held much of a grudge against the Peace Corps, but neither did I have much interest in it. I was otherwise occupied.
What aroused that interest once again in Iowa was a surfeit of unhappiness. I’d completed my doctoral coursework and exams, but doubted I would ever write a dissertation, so my graduate work felt like a waste of time. My personal life and relationships were in sad shape. I was living a pretty solitary existence. Inspired by the back-to-the-earth movement and dreams of self-sufficiency, I’d bought on contract a big old house on five acres of rich Iowa farmland, and guided by Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening, Ruth Stout, The Whole Earth Catalog, and advice from more knowledgeable friends and neighbors, I set about transforming myself from an apartment-dweller from the Bronx to a hippie homesteader raising rabbits and worms, a couple of hogs, and a goat; getting my water, when the foot valve wasn’t clogged, from a shallow artesian well; and keeping warm through the frigid Iowa winters with an Ashley airtight stove fueled with wood from discarded slabs from a nearby sawmill. It was the good life, but not quite good enough.
Other things going on in the world weighed on me. Every day news broadcasts updated the American public about the fate of the hostages being held in Iran, even though the only news was that they were still there, and I couldn’t help wondering how I would fare in their shoes. Also lingering in the back of mind was an uncomfortable feeling about skipping out on a tour of duty in Nam. It wasn’t exactly guilt that I felt, and certainly not regret. I probably would have felt guiltier if I’d gone. But there were lots of guys just my age who did go, and those who survived came back physically and emotionally marked by the experience. Why should I have escaped scot-free?
I identified what it was I felt then many years later when a biopsy came back positive. Instead of being devastated on hearing the word cancer as I would have expected, I felt a strange sense of relief. I was paying my dues. I wasn’t thrilled about having cancer, but other people were stricken by terrible diseases all the time—why should I be exempt? That’s what it was that I felt about not going to Vietnam—that I hadn’t paid my dues and was let off the hook out of dumb luck. (I’m not deriving much relief from it, but these days as our country self-destructs, I remind myself that, unlike most people around the globe and throughout history, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have lived in relative comfort in a free and prosperous country. As that lucky streak comes to an end, I tell myself to be thankful for what I had rather than regret what’s been lost.)
I had friends in Iowa who’d been Peace Corps Volunteers—a couple that were in Iran, a woman who was in Botswana, a guy who was in Ethiopia. They all valued their experiences. That information must have been percolating in the back of my mind, but the deciding factor, as I recall it now, was a documentary on TV about a photojournalist, an Australian, I think, who undertook substantial hardships and risks to report on the fighting in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, I sat stewing in my own misery over all my little problems, feeling sorry for myself. What a fool I was! There were more interesting, more useful ways of dying than doing myself in, and maybe even more interesting and more useful ways of living. And that, to the best of my recollection, is what decided me to apply to the Peace Corps for the second time.
July, 2025